One of the earliest film versions of King Lear (retitled Re Lear) was made in Italy in 1910 with Ermete Novelli as King Lear. What takes over three hours on stage was packed into a dense 16 minutes of action that remains haunting many decades on.

Almost 80 years before the 1997 movie A Thousand Acres based on Jane Smiley's novel, which transposed the play to contemporary Iowa, French director Louis Feuillade was doing something similar in Le Roi Lear Au Village, a 1911 adaptation in which Lear becomes a blind French farmer who foolishly gives over his land to his two heartless daughters. Alas, I couldn't find any footage online.

You have to fast-forward to the latter part of the 20th century before finding major performances by prominent actors on film. Paul Scofield played Lear in a Jan Kott-influenced production by Peter Brook at the RST in Stratford in 1962 and subsequently in London and on an international tour.

Before rehearsals began Brook called Lear a mountain that had never been reached by any actor and that there had been casualties of those attempting the climb along the way. "Olivier here, Laughton there; it's frightening." The production was well received – although Laurence Olivier was jealous of its success: "I wasn't one of its admirers. He rid Lear of his glamour, kingliness, made him down to earth. People nicknamed the play 'Mr Lear'". Almost 10 years later, it was filmed, in black and white, and in bitter weather in Jutland, and generally captured none of the power of Scofield's stage interpretation. The movie's unrelenting monotony led critic Pauline Kael to dub it "Night of the Living Dead".

Brook's version in part got short shrift as it came out very shortly after Grigori Kozintsev's admired Russian Korol Lear. It was adapted by Boris Pasternak and the score was by Shostakovich, which frequently drowns out Shakespeare. But it looks pretty wild, and it's no surprise it made a bigger impact than Brook's cruelly downbeat attempt.

Olivier's jealousy of Scofield's stage success with Lear was probably due to his own failure in the role. When he played the part in 1946 while still in his 30s, Alec Guinness's fool got the plaudits despite Olivier's attempts to minimise the role. On film, Olivier got his chance in 1983, when aged 75 and already frail, he led a starry TV version that won him an Emmy.

Simon Russell Beale comes at the role at a time that has been something of a golden age for Lears, including highly acclaimed performances over the last half-dozen years or so including Ian McKellen's dropped-trousers version for the RSC, which was filmed for US TV; Derek Jacobi; Jonathan Pryce, and just last autumn Frank Langella at Chichester.

All of them have proved Charles Lamb wrong when he declared: "The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted." Russell Beale will surely do the same.

Do share your favourite performances of King Lear, including film clips if you can find them – but don't worry if you can't.

For some critics, the new National Theatre production is the 'most satisfying' in ages, for others it suffered from director Sam Mendes's 'errors of judgment'. Matt Trueman reports on how the critics weighed in